Urban Renaissance Institute

The Next City
March 21, 1997

The second suppression of Saigon

IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE END OF THE Vietnam War in 1975, the victorious communists renamed Saigon after their leader, Ho Chi Minh, purged it of discos, luxury shops and other Western excesses, moved part of the populace to the countryside and brought the city to a listless calm.

Then came economic liberation: In 1986, the government opened the country to foreign investment, and in 1992 the country began to trade with the United States. The city — with its large literate population, strong work ethic and prior experience in a market economy exploded — with growth. Dubbed the next likely “Asian tiger,” Ho Chi Minh City became a hive of development activity, revelling in its newfound freedom: Cafés and dance clubs opened to meet the yearnings of urban sophisticates, Western T-shirts and designer dresses adorn fashionable young women; Doi Moi square in the centre of the city jumps with activity Saturday nights, and downtown streets throng day and night. The Saigon name also made a comeback: Because the city’s residents stubbornly refused to put a pall over their home town by accepting its leader’s name, the authorities compromised, grudgingly naming the city centre Saigon while keeping Ho Chi Minh City as the metropolitan area’s moniker. With Ho Chi Minh City a magnet for people in the rest of the country seeking a better life, its official population has climbed back to match its Vietnam War high of 4.5 million. Rural folk who come to the city in search of casual work or to hawk their wares swell the population figure to 6.5 million.

In its rapid resuscitation, Ho Chi Minh City has been struggling to keep pace with development demands. Developers from Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore, teamed up with Vietnamese landowning companies, have been erecting apartment blocks, office towers and highrise hotels, and individuals have been redeveloping their own single-storey dwellings on narrow lots into four, five and even six-storey buildings. But these haven’t been enough. Most of the unofficial residents live on the street or in illegally constructed dwellings — some 24,000 of which are concentrated along the drainage canals, contaminating the water (one estimate claims two cubic metres of rubbish lurk beneath every square metre of water surface). While the city has been filled to incredible densities — with buildings rising out of courtyards, spanning watercourses and clambering alongside walls — the average amount of housing space per resident is now only 5.8 square metres.

DEVELOPERS ARE HAMSTRUNG by the Ho Chi Minh City development plan, an unwieldy straightjacket that was out of date even before its approval in 1993. To compensate for the plan’s shortcomings, Ho Chi Minh City planners published still more detailed plans in 1995 for each of the city’s 18 districts. These plans prescribe existing and proposed land uses, specifying building lines for every street, desired activities, target population and floor space densities, public utility requirements and lists of public and private projects. These more detailed plans also failed to cope with Ho Chi Minh City’s burgeoning growth. Planners went back to the drawing board, where they devised a series of yet more detailed land-use plans at the ward level.

To assess the impact of new buildings, planners use a 1:1000 scale model of the city centre. Would-be developers produced a miniature model to insert into the available spaces in the master plan — at one point last year they had 80 highrises of up to 37 storeys in the queue. A larger 1:250 model aids more detailed discussions.

The municipal regulators — including 80 professionals specializing in urban planning — have also failed to keep up with increased demands for mobility. To the regulators’ chagrin, the city’s increasingly affluent citizens have been trading in their bicycles for motorized two-wheelers to navigate the narrow and maze-like routes through city neighborhoods: 70 per cent of households now own at least one motorbike. City streets remain in disrepair, yet planners are still mapping out public transit strategies.

Less hardened municipal bureaucrats might have thrown their hands up in the air, admitted defeat against this tide of human energy and initiative and loosened their planning restrictions, letting developers build the housing and provide the services that the public so clearly clamors for.

But not these veterans of guerrilla wars. Instead, they have stepped in with the same ruthlessness of the military planners almost a quarter century ago. To settle the issue of urban congestion, the government has adopted a draconian population decentralization policy — one that will expropriate large tracts of city lands, clear them for development and expel 70 per cent of the urban population to the suburbs. To provide breathing room for the remaining city centre inhabitants, the planners opted for two megaprojects: an 800-hectare development across the Saigon river to the east and a 2,600-hectare site to the south. By fiat, the government will limit the total population of this greater Ho Chi Minh region to 7.5 million by the year 2010. And to solve traffic congestion, bulldozers will widen roads to suit large public transit vehicles.

In this Pol Pot with-a-kinder-face policy, the planners call for 12 CIPs — consolidated industrial parks — to be built on the city’s outskirts, each with its own housing and infrastructure. Six existing towns within a 100-kilometre radius are slated for expansion, becoming satellite cities of 200,000 to 700,000 people.

Lawrence Solomon

Winnipeg: the urban planners’ failed conceit

ON THE SILVER ANNIVERSARY OF WINNIPEG’S amalgamation, the evidence is in: The amalgamation of Winnipeg’s 13 urban municipalities into one unified city has been an abject failure.

The grand scheme, officially called “Winnipeg Unicity,” was implemented in 1972. As envisaged, it did create a large regional government endowed with exclusive taxing authority and monopoly power over vital services. The rationale behind consolidation was plausible to many at the time: Increased efficiency resulting from the elimination of duplication would reduce costs and improve services. But the planners did not anticipate the consequences. Instead of the hoped-for administrative savings and improvements in service levels, amalgamation created a Byzantine administrative tangle and high-cost government that debilitated the city’s economy.

Winnipeg’s unified service-delivery systems now have all the classic problems of traditional municipal governments, only magnified. They focus on the needs of providers first, those of taxpayers last, and they disproportionately spend on administration to the detriment of front-line services. They reward process rather than result and encourage a spend-it-or-lose-it behavior.

Winnipeg’s financial position has deteriorated substantially due to Unicity governance:

• A recent independent review into a spectacular $210-million assessment demonstrates a staggering lack of accountability and a deep malaise within Winnipeg’s municipal government.
• Interest payments on the sizable debt run-up during the civic building binge of the late ’70s and early ’80s are crowding out funds for long-standing municipal services.
• The streets and operations department opened the “Taj Mahal,” its swank new $5.6-million headquarters, in the spring of 1994. A year and a half later, officials came to City Council with a proposal to spend $530,000 more on renovating it to “save the city money.” Departments were being consolidated, they said, and the 40 employees now moving in needed new walls, lighting, heating and mechanical systems.
• In 1994, the civic employees’ union secured a five-year, “no layoff” contract, although internal estimates, where done, show that in-house provision of services costs up to 60 per cent more than alternatives readily available in the marketplace.In late 1996, Moody’s confirmed the magnitude of the problems by cutting the city’s top-notch credit rating.

  With the Unicity in place, citizens could no longer vote with their feet against government extravagance, for the informal and healthy tax competition that had formerly existed between municipalities in the Winnipeg region was gone. The monopoly behaved like a monopoly.

  Statistics tell the story. Municipal staffing in Winnipeg stood slightly below 10,000 in 1995. Compare this with an efficient city like London, Ontario, where a staff of about 3,200 serves a city of 325,000 — roughly half of Winnipeg’s size of 642,000. On a rough per capita basis, Winnipeg taxpayers employ proportionately 1.6 times the staff to do roughly the same work.

  That is one of the main reasons for Winnipeg’s slow growth rate, its downtown troubles, and the consequent social problems and crime. Surveys show Winnipeg comes out consistently at or near the top of the scale in terms of property tax burden.

  Winnipeg’s high property tax rates are also propelling a silent tax revolt that chips away relentlessly at the tax base. In the past, Winnipeg could expect almost ten times as many housing starts as the surrounding municipalities. Now the balance is even. With outlying communities on the edge of the city offering a more humane tax regime, less red tape and lower all-round operating and living costs, moving beyond the perimeter offers obvious financial rewards.

  Yet, too many in Winnipeg’s urban planning community haven’t twigged to the problem of municipal government gone awry. Their response to the problem of amalgamation is more amalgamation. The province, they say, should force nearby bedroom communities to raise taxes to level the playing field with Winnipeg, or better yet, the city should annex these low-property tax areas.

  Peter Holle

Okey Chigbo
The Next City
March 21, 1997

The Next City Discussion Group, Reading, writing and racism. Black ideology is the black child’s most debilitating burden

Letters

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1. Staci Hirsch, Chicago, responds: May 13, 1997
2. Jim Torczyner , Director, Montreal Consortium for Human Right Advocacy Training/McGill Consortium for Ethnicity and Strategic Social Planning, responds: May 27, 1997
3. Mendelson Joe Toronto, responds: July 9 1997
4. Professors Scott Davies, Cyril Levitt, and Neil McLaughlin , Hamilton, Ontario, responds: July 22, 1997.
5. Don Vernon , Calgary, responds: September 2, 1997.
6. Okey Chigbo replies
7. Drs. George Dei and Patrick Solomon  Toronto, respond: December 16, 1997
8. Okey Chigbo replies ,
9. Jane Lucas Westinghouse Career Academy, Chicago, responds: July 7, 1999

Staci Hirsch, Chicago, responds: May 13, 1997

I am not one of those blacks who will shun you at dinner parties. As a matter of fact, you would be the headliner guest at my next one . . .

Your interview on CBC’s Sunday Morning (May 11) and article in The NEXT CITY were right on target. You and I both know that you are only stating and “scientifically” verifying what many blacks often say, albeit quietly, among each other every day. It is a shame that we have done so little about it short of marches around the White House. Often, when such comments are made, they are done so by well-off blacks in a why-can’t-those-people-stop-embarrassing-
us tone. This is especially true of those who pepper the social service positions (i.e., social workers, case managers, psychologists, etc.) who are supposed to help but all to often hurt. The underlining attitude is: “I made it, why can’t you, fool?” without recognizing that many of us who did make it came from families who invested, heavily, in us — from cradle through college/graduate school. So much for empathy.

Jim Torczyner, Director, Montreal Consortium for Human Right Advocacy Training/McGill Consortium for Ethnicity and Strategic Social Planning, responds: May 27, 1997

Okey Chigbo’s “Reading, writing and racism” (Spring 1997) is a cogent, eloquent, and passionate statement regarding the causes of and solutions to black underachievement in school. Mr. Chigbo seeks to counter a prevailing attitude among many black thinkers and among policy makers generally which blames a racist system for black underachievement. Mr. Chigbo argues that not only have antiracist policies and programs proven to be ineffective in raising levels of black educational performance, but they run the risk of internalizing a message to young blacks that they need not bother because the system is so loaded against them, that even their best efforts will not succeed. Blaming the system, according to Mr. Chigbo, avoids naming the problem, which, in his view and those of other researchers he cites, is that of insufficient motivation and support in black families for education which is intensified by the alarmingly high percentage of single parent families. “School reforms will yield few benefits. Altering self-defeating behaviors will yield far more.”

Mr. Chigbo’s argument joins a growing list of black activists, who while disagreeing profoundly with Mr. Chigbo about racism and its importance, exhort blacks to take greater responsibility for social problems in their community. The Reverend Jessie Jackson’s recent pronouncements about “black on black violence” and Minister Farakhan’s Million Man March directed black men to assume greater social and family responsibility. These illustrate that self-help, motivation, and determination are the necessary tools of emancipation, and greater emphasis must be placed on community building, strengthening families, and empowering young blacks with the values and tools of education and personal responsibility.

Mr. Chigbo goes one important step farther. He argues that while racism exists and schools and curriculum do require improvement, the racism card is a crutch. “By holding schools accountable for the grades of racial minority students, minority groups cannot be responsible for their poor performance, leaving little room for individual and group responsibility for success or failure.” As such, (this) “black ideology is the black child’s most debilitating burden.”

Although Mr. Chigbo’s article provides a welcome if provocative balance to the current debate about educational performance of blacks in Canada, it runs the risks of artificially dichotomizing this complex problem, of drawing conclusions based on inaccurate inferences from the American experience, and of not taking into consideration the unique demographic experience of blacks in Canada which shapes support for educational achievement.

Causes of underachievement are complex and include a variety of personal, family, socioeconomic, and institutional factors. Natural ability, personal motivation, family stability, and the value placed on education by parents, peers, and the community at large of course influence educational performance. There are both ample research findings and common sense understandings that children who grow up in two parent families which are stable, with university educated parents who wish the same for their children, and are surrounded by peers who come from similar backgrounds are more likely to succeed in school.

Equally important are socioeconomic conditions such as poverty, unemployment, and underemployment which create poor learning environments for children. Overcrowded conditions, financial pressures, combined often with the possibility of eviction and homelessness do not bode well for concentration on academic work. Indeed, research and common sense suggest that children who grow up in middle class families, who have their own room to study in equipped with Internet technology, who are well-fed and well-nourished and face none of the precariousness associated with poverty are more likely to succeed in school than children who live in poverty.

It is also abundantly clear that the structure and quality of educational institutions influence children’s performance. Better financed schools with up-to-date facilities, equipment, and texts, smaller classrooms offering individual attention, and quality experienced teachers, and the degree to which teachers and course content resonate the cultural backgrounds of students all impact on children’s capacity to learn. Children of the poor do not have access to many of these resources. It is also not unreasonable to assume that if there is a paucity of minority teachers in schools with large minority student populations, and, if these teachers have little experience outside of their work environment with minority populations, they might not choose the most appropriate teaching tools and texts and may not have the same expectations for black children and their potential for success as they do for students from the “majority” culture.

Notwithstanding, more kids succeed in school than fail from whatever their particular background and some schools are better than others. Some poor kids do well in school and some rich kids fail. Rather, the point which needs to be underscored is that an almost exclusive focus on parental attitudes as the main cause of underachievement which does not take into account demographic and institutional factors may balance a debate, but does not effectively advance policy and practice.

Furthermore, there is often a tendency to transfer the American experience to the Canadian scene and to, therefore, assume that American findings have relevance to the black experience in Canada. Obviously, blacks constitute a much smaller percentage of the population in Canada than they do in the United States. Nor did blacks in Canada experience the brutality of American slavery, or the viciousness of segregation. This is not to say that Canada has been a model of civility. Slavery did exist, racist and discriminatory policies were carried out, and acts of violence against blacks continue to this day. The point is, however, that the magnitude of these issues pales compared to the American experience.

Moreover, in our recently released preliminary demographic profile of blacks in Canada (Diversity, Mobility and Change: The Dynamics of Black Communities in Canada, 1997) we found that almost half of all blacks in Canada immigrated here in the past 20 years (45 per cent), the majority of whom came from independent black countries in the Caribbean and Africa. Another 45 per cent of blacks in Canada were under the age of 25 in 1991. Only 2 per cent of blacks in Canada were born in the United States. Taken together, there is little empirical evidence to suggest similarities between the American and Canadian experience or to assume that the persistent racism of the American experience played itself out in Canada in the same way or to the same degree.

Not surprisingly, Canadian demographic data about blacks reveal a different image than the American scene and paint a picture different than what is generally reported. According to our study, blacks have approximately the same levels of educational attainment as the entire population. Black men are somewhat better educated than Canadian men generally.

These findings are preliminary and they must be examined in greater detail because they seem to contradict other studies which are cited by Mr. Chigbo. Our demographic study does not tell us anything about the quality of these educational experiences or how well black students do compared with Canadians generally. The study only identifies the level of education achieved. It does not compare at the present time levels of education in particular cities or neighborhoods, but these studies should be completed over the next two years. The data also indicates that a smaller percentage of blacks were dependent on public assistance than Canadians generally, and a higher percentage work. Such findings are in sharp contrast to the American figures.

Notwithstanding, there are large-scale demographic forces which shape the experience of blacks in Canada and which could contribute to underachievement. First, there are disproportionately more black women of marriage age than black men in Canada. This is exclusively accounted for by black women who were born in the Caribbean as past Canadian policy encouraged their immigration to Canada as “domestics” and in various service occupations. These same policies did not facilitate the immigration of Caribbean men.

Second, there is a substantially higher percentage of younger persons and children in the black community when compared to the Canadian population generally. Fifty-five per cent of the black population was under the age of 30 in 1991, compared with 44 per cent of Canadians generally. Conversely less than 10 per cent of blacks and almost 20 per cent of Canadians generally were aged 55 or over.

It is, therefore, not surprising to find substantially higher percentages of single parent families in the black community than among Canadians generally. Of black families, 8.1 per cent were headed by a single parent compared with 3.6 per cent of Canadian families generally. Among blacks, more than 3 out of 10 children (36 per cent) under the age of 14 lived in a single parent family, compared with about 1 in 7 Canadian children generally (13.8 per cent). Given these demographic data, child poverty is twice as high among blacks than among all Canadian children. Four out of 10 black children lived in poverty in 1991.

Blacks earn less than Canadians generally, and poverty is much higher among blacks. Although we found a higher percentage of blacks work, we also found a higher percentage unemployed. Blacks are overrepresented in service and clerical occupations and manual work, and underrepresented in more secure and higher paying senior and middle management positions, supervisors, and in skilled crafts and trades. Blacks are less likely to be self employed or live off of investments.

The extent to which these data mirror the immigrant experience of most groups or are a reflection of particular issues in the black communities or of racism is open to debate and certainly requires more detailed study. Notwithstanding, these demographic data point to the same general conclusions to which both “exhortationists” of personal motivation and behavior as well as the “denouncers” of pervasive institutional racism have arrived.

That is, black families in Canada are experiencing considerable stress and require support. Black community organizations do not have sufficient resources to establish the network of support systems necessary to deal with the combined effect of widespread, recent, immigration, high levels of single parent families and child poverty, the absence of grandparents and the lack of accumulated wealth in the black community. An understanding of these demographic realities might sharpen policy direction, tone down ideological pronouncements, and outline effective strategies for intervention.

Mendelson Joe, Toronto, responds: July 9, 1997

I write to praise the work of Okey Chigbo and his calm analysis and reason on the question and performance (by blacks).

Professors Scott Davies, Cyril Levitt, and Neil McLaughlin, Hamilton, Ontario, respond: July 22, 1997

Congratulations on an excellent article.

The ongoing dispute about “political correctness” has given rise to heated political debates, numerous books and countless articles, and has become a prominent part of popular culture. Yet far too much of the discussion has been polarized by extreme positions and simplified by media coverage of such complicated issues as race and gender relations, speech codes and censorship, school curriculum, affirmative action, critical legal theory, and sexual harassment. Conservative critics of social change as well as simplistic cultural radicals have had their say, but their near monopoly on public discussion has made it difficult to address contemporary cultural politics on campuses with complexity and nuance. The debate has been presented to the broader public as a clash between the left and the right in the political arena. We believe that this is an error.

Liberal and democratic leftist critics of extreme versions of antiracism, feminism, multiculturalism, and post-modernism need not be considered part of some “right-wing backlash.” Like you, we refuse to use the extreme positions of some on the cultural left to attack basic liberal principles and the politics of the democratic left.

Don Vernon, Calgary, responds: September, 1997

First, let me thank you for researching and writing this article. Hopefully it may influence the views of those black parents who for too long have allowed themselves and their children to become victims of circumstances.

I agree with the basic thrust of the article, i.e., black parents must take responsibility for their lives and in particular for their role as parents. Too often parents do not involve themselves in the education of their children, choosing rather, deliberately or inadvertently, to have the school system take on that responsibility. No doubt the school system has a responsibility to provide an environment in which our children are able to learn. However, the responsibility of the school system does not abrogate the equal responsibility of parents (or single parents) to monitor the progress and learning of their child(ren). The time is well overdue for all black parents (not only the enlightened few) to reclaim the responsibility of parenting and to make schooling a top priority with their children.

Once again, thank you.

Okey Chigbo replies

I agree with a lot of what Professor Torczyner has written. Nevertheless, a few things I must challenge.

First of all, it is not news to say that the black problem is complex. Everything is complex, from the seemingly simple unicellular organism to our vast universe, which we are now told may actually be one of many. However, that the universe is complex does not prevent scientists from focusing on the essentials that yield greater understanding.

No one with even the faintest understanding of the problem would argue that socioeconomic conditions are unimportant. Socioeconomic conditions can indeed begin to tell us why blacks do poorly. But they can’t give us a finer reading on why poor Asians outperform both poor whites and poor blacks in the same circumstance, or why some poor blacks from some parts of the world outperform poor blacks from other parts; or as has been found in one U.S. study, why poor Asians outperform some middle-class whites and significant numbers of middle-class blacks. Are the parents of these poor Asians sacrificing all to give their children “their own rooms to study in equipped with Internet technology?” If so, such a ferocious desire for education should be instructive for the other groups. Or are the Asian parents, as Stanford researcher Sanford Dornbusch found, instilling in their children the cultural belief that anyone can do well in school if he works bloody hard enough and burns the midnight oil? After all, Internet technology can be found in most public libraries these days.

I am surprised that Professor Torczyner finds in my essay an “almost exclusive focus on parental attitudes as the main cause of underachievement.” Did he read it carefully? Did he read all of it? I thought I also discussed at length the harmful beliefs and attitudes of the black intelligentsia, and the growth of an anti-school culture among the youth.

Black Canadian and U.S. demographics do indeed differ, as do Canadian black and American black experiences. But does this criticism apply to my article? I looked at areas with proven similarities (and even Professor Torczyner cannot deny that these exist). For instance, I selected two major surveys from either side of the border that basically revealed the same things about black academic performance. In other areas such as parental involvement in education and the consequences of single parenthood, again, the studies done by the Toronto Board of Education and Statistics Canada mirror studies done in the U.S. (even the peer group work of Ogbu and Fordham in the U.S. is in some ways echoed by the “resistance” work of Solomon in Canada). Professor Torczyner’s criticism would be valid if these studies and surveys reveal significantly different results between Canada and the U.S.: they do not.

We must also ask, are black Canadian and black American behaviors and ways of viewing the world that different? The problem with Professor Torczyner’s demographic argument is that it ignores the powerful influence of culture. Canada, after all, isn’t a thousand miles away from the U.S.; we are inundated with the lifestyle, ideas and worldview of the big ugly guy next door. Perhaps Professor Torczyner is unaware of the extent to which some young black males in Toronto embrace hip-hop style and gangsta rap, or pursue basketball as a viable career option. But he must know the extent to which the Canadian black intelligentsia borrows its ideas from the U.S., whether it is antiracist theory or Afrocentricism; the works of African-American intellectuals Cornel West, bell hooks, and Molefi Kete Asante are very popular among Toronto’s black readership. The truth is that U.S. thinking about race thoroughly permeates black Canadian ideas on the subject, and these ideas strongly influence black Canadians. That’s why the L.A. riots sparked a mini-riot in Toronto, and why we also had our own “Hundred Man March” here.

Professor Torczyner also minimizes the shared history of slavery, and to some extent racism, of black Caribbeans and black Americans, a history that has engendered in both populations a deep resentment toward white society and culture. It is this shared resentment that makes black Canadians so hungry for the race ideas produced south of the border. I once attended a Toronto lecture given by African-American crank race theorist Frances Cress Welsing; the lecture hall was jammed with young blacks who wildly cheered every bizarre and utterly mad thing she said simply because it denigrated whites. If Professor Torczyner were to interview black high school students in Toronto, as I have done, he would discover that they hold many Afrocentric ideas that originate in the American race crucible.

Finally, the study headed by Professor Torczyner, which claims that blacks have the same or higher educational attainments than the general populace, does not necessarily contradict the surveys of high school performance I cited. Because many blacks in Canada are immigrants who require high educational attainments to qualify for immigrant status, black immigrants may raise the black average.

Drs. George Dei and Patrick Solomon, Toronto, respond: December 16, 1997

Okey Chigbo’s article has raised some troublesome questions about black underachievement in school: a continuing problem in search of a solution. We would like to make the following contribution to this perpetual debate and more specifically, offer a critique of Chigbo’s perspectives in this debate.

Our overall impression is that this article is filled with contradictions and extreme rhetoric against those who see and identify racist policies and practices in schools and society. The writer criticizes antiracist workers, academics, and professionals for only focusing on race. This is an inaccurate reading of those positions by the way. But more disturbingly, in a very exaggerated way, he proceeds to critique the views of the antiracism authors in a limited and one dimensional way, basically dismissing the existence of systemic racism. His very limited understanding of the issue of race and schooling leads him to argue that an assertion of racism in schools means all educators/teachers are racists.

In fact, his critique of antiracist workers comes across as filled with anger rather than contributing a different view that may in some way contribute to a dialogue on different perspectives to the problems schools and students are facing. While his rhetoric often angrily dismisses academic positions, he then goes into the North American historical view of the “inferiority of blacks” and must quote academics that have worked to dismantle that view. Within this context perhaps he should respect the needs for the dialogue among educational theorists and practitioners grappling with social justice issues. We must all continually search and work for an understanding of why certain groups perform more poorly than others. Rather than argue or rationalize causes as “natural law,” we must identify problems and seek solutions. Of course this dialogue must be respected and entered into as a discourse of mutually common goals with perhaps different perspectives. Perhaps, the only view that deserves the degree of anger Mr. Chigbo demonstrates are views such as those of Rushton, that is, views that seek to justify oppression.

There is really little rigor and discipline to the ideas and arguments put forward in Chigbo’s article. He refers to us as academics that take on an “antiracist approach.” But then he uses a definition of “antiracism” that is not ours. This may be excused if we have not defined “antiracism” in our writings. To criticize a position and then use a different definition for the argument is to blatantly deceive the reader. For to criticize, the author must read and fully comprehend our work. If he had done so, Chigbo would have come across our working definitions of how we understand and operationalize antiracism.

“Antiracists either ignore or dismiss the state of black families as a ‘pathological explanation.'” This provocative statement of Chigbo’s invites the negative labelling and blaming the victim. He goes on to catalogue the numerous ways in which the black/Caribbean family has become socially dysfunctional in Canadian society, and how such pathology negatively impacts school achievement. He unwittingly draws on the thesis of “evolutionary scientists” in explaining parental and paternal investment in child rearing practices, an argument dangerously similar to that of Phillipe Rushton, a researcher with links to genetics and “scientific racism” movement. Antiracist educators would rather invest their energies creating equitable, racism-free environments for black children than getting caught up in Chigbo’s labelling game.

We are truly puzzled by Chigbo’s preoccupation with the genetics issue while stating that he will just “quickly dispatch a mischievous idea that rears up every so often in North America.” It is interesting that he uses words like “mischievous idea that rears up every so often.” Yet on pages 35 and 36, he uses very extreme negative language to describe how antiracists view racism (“tremendous,” “religious power,” malignant,” “pervasive,” “satan,” “contaminate,” “virulent racism”).

Along these same lines, he quotes and supports John Ogbu’s position. While Professor Ogbu shys away from using race as the issue, he indeed does not shy away from identifying the problem of a people that perceive themselves as colonized and the mainstream society which they resist as the colonizer. Furthermore, Dr. Ogbu does not shy away from identifying discrimination in a society that does not reward blacks or other marginalized groups in the market economy to the degree as it does certain dominant groups. While using what he likes of Ogbu, Chigbo conveniently does not include what is important. Indeed, he must read Ogbu thoroughly if he expects some of us to take his interpretations seriously.

Research on race is an unsettling issue for many Canadians. Throughout Chigbo’s works (both in The NEXT CITY and Canadian Living) he discounted any non-quantitative research that utilizes student narratives. He often marginalized such works as “anecdote dependent” and “dependence on testimony,” and implies that student voice in illegitimate and unreliable. On the other hand, he projects tremendous confidence in quantitative data and utilized them selectively in his articles.

Increasingly, researchers are finding survey data to be unreliable in portraying accurate attitudes and perspectives on race, racism, and antiracism in society. In survey data, for example, respondents have become adept at providing politically correct responses that are misleading and deceptive. In a recent national survey teachers indicate overwhelming commitment (94 per cent) to antiracist education. However, when follow-up interviews probed for their individual beliefs, perspectives, ideologies, and classroom practices, there emerged an obvious contradiction between survey and interview data. So when researching issues of race, critics must be cautious in dismissing an inquiry approach as illegitimate.

Chigbo’s simplistic notions of racism in Canadian society made him question how people could abhor racism, act against it, and the system would still be blamed if minorities do poorly. What is the impact then of antiracism education (ARE), a policy developed by provincial governments and progressive school boards? The answer rests with the way teachers conceptualize, practice, or resist ARE. Many educators develop attitudes and behaviors that make ARE impossible to implement. It is therefore premature for critics to marginalize ARE as ineffective when some educators, for pedagogical and ideological reasons, have not endorsed or implemented it.

Chigbo’s understanding of antiracist theory and its impact on educational inequality of minority groups needs scrutiny. He argues that ARE advocates want equality of outcome even when minorities don’t deserve it. What we argue for is a system that provides equitably, not equally, for all students depending on their needs. There are many factors such as social class, disability, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, and race that may require schools to provide the quality and quantity education students need to maximize their potential.

Yet Chigbo raises the divisive argument about race/ethnic groups in society and reduces difference in their school performance to interest, skill, and ability. Does he mean that Japanese students do well at computers because they are interested, South Asians excel at maths because of their skill, and blacks at athletics because of their ability? Students of any ethno-racial group will develop interest, skill, and ability in any area of their choice given the proper learning environment, teacher expectation, and equitable resources. Factors such as socio-economic status often create bigger intra-group than inter-group differences in school performance and achievement. These are variables Chigbo failed to factor in when expounding his inter-group comparisons. He readily condemns the West Indian child for doing poorly in Britain and Canada but overlooks the research in the U.S. (by Thomas Sewell and others) that shows West Indians to be performing exceptionally well in the school and the workplace. Why is this so? Comparative studies are often suspect when they ignore or deliberately overlook critical intervening variables.

Chigbo’s naive assumptions about racism, “something working away in ‘the system,’ even when nobody wants it,” seem to suggest that racism is still an individual act of bigotry carried out by the anti-social on the fringes of society. If this was the case, antiracist educators could easily target these “undesirables” and disempower them. But institutional and structural racism are much more difficult to eradicate. These have evolved historically in the life of this nation; it is evident in what counts as knowledge in our curriculum and how it is disseminated in our schools (pedagogy), who is in positions of responsibility and power, and how resources are allocated. From a study of these patterns over time, it becomes evident which racial/ethnic groups benefit and which are marginalized, and even disenfranchised by the differential distribution of resources. For Chigbo to suggest that nobody wants racism is an unfortunate oversight.

Chigbo’s call for universal middle class education sounds like REAL women stating that women have embraced white-middle-class-patriarchal education that taught women of the privileged classes well, or the Parents for Quality Education’s return for an education system that taught the basics and privileged a class and culture.

The solutions and problems are complex, but unfortunately this article does not contribute to a critical engagement of ideas. It basically raises the rhetoric and dismisses issues such as institutional/systemic racism, classism, and sexism, etc. We have at no point in our work argued that the problem and solution to youth education lies within schools alone. The report, Drop Out or Push Out?, makes it abundantly clear that some students leave school prematurely for pragmatic reasons (e.g., early parenthood or employment needs). Others leave school, or become disengaged from school, because of the complex dynamics of the culture, environment, and organizational lives of schools. Disengaged students and “dropouts” are usually very critical of the structures of public schooling, articulating their concerns around differential [negative] treatment by race and the challenge of having to deal with an exclusive curriculum. Furthermore, these students are dissatisfied with communicative and pedagogic practices of school that fail to adequately explore the complexities of experiences that have shaped, and continue to shape, human growth and social development. The students, cited in the report, also complain of the paucity of black and minority teachers in the school system. Such concerns are pervasive in students’ voices to the extent that they emerge in response to seemingly unrelated questions or descriptions. Students also hold their parents accountable. In fact, many of the students desire that their families take a more proactive role in youth education. It beats my understanding why someone would argue that our study traces all school problems to race and racism.

Disturbingly, Chigbo writes that the foremost issue is single parenthood, and “that poor black performance does not stem from the school environment. It does stem from the state of some black families. . . . The survey notes that those with both parents at home tend to perform better than those living with single or no parents, a relationship that holds across all racial groups.” The problem with such statements is that it does not account for socio-economic status, nor does it examine other groups that may not be defined as a racial group. Therefore the statistics for such groups go unnoticed in this category. In the Toronto school board survey it is important to note that at the time the Portuguese were noted as having one of the highest rates of two parent families. (Today, this may be changing perception). The point though is that the academic performance of Portuguese youth is not reflective of that but rather more reflective of the blacks, First nations, class, and single parent status. What does that say to such a general statement on single or two parent families?

Black resistance in schooling is historically rooted and predates the contribution of Chigbo’s so-called “black intelligentsia.” Since slavery blacks have developed a culture of resistance as a response to the racism and oppression to which they were subjected in their daily lives. Robin Wink’s authoritative work: Blacks in Canada, A History, documents quite explicitly blacks’ oppositional response to institutional racism that subordinated and marginalized them in every aspect of their daily lives (in schools, communities, the armed forces, the workplace, law enforcement). Black students as Canadian students and their parents in the workplace are informed by their living experiences in a racialized society, not by the “black intelligentsia.” They develop their own response styles, utilizing their cultural resources in the most creative and strategic ways.

Black Resistance in High School, a book from which Chigbo quoted extensively in his article, is an ethnography of black boys’ lived experiences in a Canadian school. They engaged in acts of resistance, that is, a political response to school curriculum and pedagogy they perceived to be counterproductive to their advancement in Canadian society. “Unsanitized” ethnography, of course, documents elements of subcultural activities on which Chigbo chose to focus, neglecting to mention that in the analysis, the author of Black Resistance denounced delinquent, sexist, and counterproductive behaviors.

The issue of black teachers as role models is one of continuing debate. Those arguing against the role model hypothesis appear to do so primarily on methodological and/or ideological grounds. They claim that the research literature available is almost exclusively qualitative in its methodology. This usually means that student, teacher, and parent narratives espousing the importance of minority teachers as role models predominate. For quantitative researchers whose work relies exclusively on surveys and statistical data to tell their stories, narratives of lived experiences are regarded as less reliable. For ideologues, the thought to adequate role modelling and representation for the rapidly expanding number of racial minority students would be daunting. The pedagogical advantages of having black teachers as role models is well documented in the research.

Okey Chigbo replies

It is hard to understand why Professors Dei and Solomon describe my views as simplistic given that they are based on the work of important U.S. scholars like Thomas Sowell and Laurence Steinberg. Nothing written by Canada’s antiracist and “resistance” professors matches Thomas Sowell’s magisterial trilogy — Preferential Policies, Race and Culture, and Migrations and Culture — an extensive historical and sociological survey of diverse cultures around the world. Sowell’s work demonstrates that while other factors may be at play in determining group success at work and in school, what is truly decisive is group culture, and the skills, behavior, and performances derived from it. Also, in terms of quantitative or qualitative work, nothing I have seen from the Canadian side even approximates the vast and detailed investigations of high school students done by Stanford’s Professor Steinberg and his colleagues. Working in a country that we must assume has a far more virulent and thoroughgoing racism than Canada, Steinberg presented convincing evidence that what really counts today is student investment, home environment, peer group and student attitude to life. Are these eminent scholars naive and simplistic? I think not.

Professors Dei and Solomon’s criticism of my use of the work of evolutionary scientists is also truly incomprehensible. Is it really “dangerously similar . . . [to the arguments] . . . of Phillipe Rushton” to say that there are certain inherited behaviors that characterize all groups in our species? Am I really agreeing with Rushton if I say that we humans are a pair-bonding species, that we pair-bond to raise our offspring, and that this is largely inherited behavior? That it may be possible to raise a large number of children outside the two-parent family, but only at tremendous social cost? Many evolutionary biologists and psychologists say as much, and at the same time provide damaging arguments against the racist ideas of Rushton. Surely our good professors do not think that every argument from inheritance is a racist one? Now that would be truly naive.

Professors Dei and Solomon are mistaken when they say I only accept quantitative studies. I have only questioned the reliability of research that is almost completely dependent on testimony. This, obviously, is because one person’s testimony is just as good as another’s. How do we know what to believe? For instance, in Professor Dei’s study, he finds that some teachers and some students give diametrically opposed testimony. Whom to believe? Professor Dei simply accepts testimony according to his preconceptions: If a student says he dropped out because there are no black teachers, this proves to Professor Dei that antiracist theories have empirical support; if on the other hand, a teacher or student says that many students drop out because school is difficult and the students won’t apply themselves, Professor Dei accuses the teacher or student of being brainwashed by the ruling ideology. This sort of stuff only satisfies the converted; a more skeptical person wants more.

I am also surprised at how Professors Dei and Solomon seem to challenge their own work in their letter. First they say that quantitative surveys are not very useful, then they say it is because “respondents have become adept at providing politically correct responses.” But that is precisely what I found troubling about their work. They (Dei more than Solomon) uncritically accepted the ideologically correct statements that the students and some teachers made to them. I will quote one particularly egregious example (there are many) from Dei’s 1995 study, Push Out or Drop Out:

The following quote shows how, in one instance, racial discrimination and isolation laid the groundwork for dropping out: “It was in grade 4, . . . I had a teacher, she blatantly did not want to teach me anything. And I was the only black kid there in the school, in the neighborhood, in the whole area . . . yeah, she was something else.” This comment also makes connections to the broader impact of the local community and social relations, and the alienation which permeated this student’s experiences. . . “by the time I got to high school, I didn’t think I was smart for anything so university was never, ever, ever in my dreams. . .” This shows how low expectations and the negative stigma associated with dropping out are internalized and can place limits on self-esteem and ultimately life chances.

I leave the reader to judge this highly creative interpretation of some very vague comments.

In the essay I wrote, I quoted extensively from the study done by Steinberg, et al., because it was both quantitative and qualitative, that is, it drew its conclusions from a massive sample of 20,000 students studied over ten years; the authors then strengthened that work with in-depth interviews of students, teachers, and parents. And the authors did not just naively accept statements at face value, they checked and cross-checked them against the quantitative data.

It is also ironic that Dei and Solomon cite Thomas Sowell’s work to support their position, given that Sowell uses the performance of West Indians in the U.S. to show that “institutional” or “systemic” racism as a causal factor in black failure is largely a myth. I am well aware that when blacks are separated into their various ethnic groups, we find that some of these groups perform just as well as anybody. There are ethnic groups among both West Indians and Africans that are noted for academic achievement, and I believe I said so in the essay I wrote. I pointed out that Africans perform very well in England not to “condemn” the West Indian child, but to show that some black ethnic groups perform as if this pervasive and systemic racism does not exist.

Professor Dei himself seems to recognize the fact of differences in black group performance, and the need to examine it. He admitted as much in a taped conversation I had with him in his OISE office on January 13, 1997, and I quote verbatim from it:

Chigbo: You are aware that Africans in England perform just as well as Asians if not better?
Professor Dei: Yes indeed. We need to look at those who are successful. If we disaggregate according to geographical areas, we are all going to see differences, there is no doubt about it.

One is hard pressed to find this sort of “divisive” comment in the reams of articles Professor Dei has written on “structural” and “institutional” racism. Why? Is it because the fact of intra-race differences suggests that there may be another factor at play here, that geographical and therefore cultural differences may account for a large part of the variation in performance?

Faced with such difficult questions, Dei and Solomon resort to obfuscation and evasions. For instance, in their letter they claim that “the pedagogical advantages of having black teachers . . . is well documented in the research.” That is not quite how Professor Dei responded when I questioned him during our taped conversation:

Chigbo: Is there research that shows that African-centred schools [i.e., schools with primarily black teachers, and a curriculum that reflects the black experience] work?
Dei: I think in the States, there are studies that show that when kids are educated in an environment which they can identify with, they are able to relate to the school, and they draw a sense of connectedness.
Chigbo: Do they perform better?
Dei: We have to define what you mean by perform better. To us, when we talk of performing better it is not simply in terms of scores. It’s in terms of how they are able to relate to each other — the social connections, how they are able to meet their responsibilities to the wider society. To us that is very important. And just because we don’t have any concrete evidence about it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be talking about it.

Perhaps this disingenuous meandering encapsulates the complexity that Professor Dei claims my arguments lack; in my naivete, of course, I merely concluded that such waffling is typical of people who know they cannot back up their claims.

Dei and Solomon’s attempt to challenge the single-parent and failure thesis with the Portuguese example is confused and misguided: the fact that the Portuguese have a high percentage of two-parent families and still fail only shows that two-parent homes do not guarantee success. I could not agree more. To give a clarifying example, you can say that in a team sport like soccer, those who play with the normal complement of 11 players tend to do better than those who play with 9. If you show me a team that does poorly with 11 players, does that refute this basic thesis? To really challenge the single-parent and failure thesis, Dei and Solomon would have to show us a group that does exceptionally well with a high percentage of single-parents. In the Portuguese case, we are allowed to state categorically that single-parenting is not a contributing factor to Portuguese failure; we don’t have that luxury with the black community.

To conclude, I will “contradict” myself, and say, yes, Professors Dei and Solomon are right — the problem is indeed complex; I will even add that no matter which way you look at it, it will be difficult to solve. I would be happier however if Dei and Solomon spent more time investigating the other side of the question; as it is, 95 per cent of their ink is expended on blaming “the system.” If they are truly concerned with complexity and with advancing the debate, perhaps after they have shown how an insensitive school system could weaken the confidence of a people who have been battered by history, they could also show in just as much detail how the same people might have developed behaviors that are not helpful, behaviors that now seem to have a pernicious life of their own. Such an honest approach would be the first step toward solving this most difficult of social problems.

Jane Lucas, Westinghouse Career Academy, Chicago, responds: July 7, 1999

I teach English at an inner-city school in Chicago. Our student population is 100 per cent black, and the majority are from poor one-parent families. I am a white teacher in a school system that is trying to improve student performance.

Your assessment of the reason for underachievement seems to be the best answer I have heard. Students must take responsibility for their own achievement and put school first, and they need support from their parents in these efforts.

This behavior is what I see in our best students. Last year our basketball team almost won the city championship, losing by one game. They are a team of great team players, but not very many super tall-athletes. They lost to a team that has players who are 6′ 8″, 6′ 10″, etc. Many of these boys are A students in my English class. They are always ready for class, have their homework done, and try for excellence. Clearly they can achieve.

Our principal feels that we should not spend time on traditional literature, especially Shakespeare. Yet most of the students really like it once we break through the language barrier. I want my students to have, in addition to their grounding in excellent black writers, an acquaintance with those work that make up our shared culture.

The real question is how to engage the others who use the excuses of racism, poverty, peer pressure, teen parenthood, etc.

Click here to read the article from part 1

Patricia Adams
The Next City
March 21, 1997

Poor countries weep, and we do too, when business and government get in bed with each other

JUST BEFORE MIDNIGHT ON SATURDAY, AUGUST 19, 1995, THE EARTHEN DAM holding back a waste pond at a Canadian-owned gold mine deep in the Guyanese Amazon erupted, spewing 3.2 billion litres of cyanide and heavy metal-laced effluent into the Omai river. Forming a crimson plume, the effluent snaked its way down a narrow tributary leading to the Essequibo river, Guyana’s main waterway.

Guyana, a former British colony on the north coast of South America, is neither a model of efficiency nor of good governance, yet its government knew a political catastrophe was at hand. Within hours it sprang into action: Via helicopter, boat and runners, it tracked the plume and warned people by loudspeaker to stay out of the water. It hastily posted danger signs, warning people not to drink, swim, bathe, wash or fish in the river, and to keep their livestock away from the river’s edge. The government then rushed drinking water to communities throughout the region.

Within two days, the news of cyanide flowing down the river had devastated the country’s fishing industry, with the origin of all fish now suspect. In the markets of Georgetown, Guyana’s capital, catches could not be sold, and some Caribbean countries banned all seafood products from Guyana. Other industries, too, suffered in the wake of the spill. Farmers could not sell produce grown along the river, small mining and logging operations were put on hold and local abattoirs, which wash the meats with river water, had to shut down. Guyana’s fledging tourist industry, boasting river eco-tours on this northern tip of the Amazon rain forest, received cancellation after cancellation. Roger Moody of the London-based group Mine Watch, an authority on mining operations, reported that the cyanide plume killed the spectrum of life in the Omai river, from fish to microbes, and caused a ticking time bomb in the Essequibo by leaching out heavy metals such as cadmium, copper, zinc, iron and mercury. Within five days, the crimson plume stretched the full 115 miles from the mine to the river’s mouth. Throughout the country, Guyanese citizens adopted cries reminiscent of the Yankee Go Home calls that rang throughout Latin America in previous decades: Take Your Poison Back Home to Canada; Stop Killing Our People; Let Omai Pack Up and Leave.

GUYANA’S WORST ENVIRONMENTAL DISASTER WAS BROUGHT TO its hapless citizens courtesy of a Canadian Crown corporation called the Export Development Corporation. Though little known to the Canadian public, every major Canadian exporter knows the EDC: This trade promoter doles out billions of tax dollars in loans and insurance to make uneconomic projects fly. EDC is the steroid that Team Canada pumps itself up with on every high profile trade mission. It functions as a kind of Patronage Canada, a federal government patronage agency that channels taxpayer support to exporting corporations. EDC money also goes to banks and other lenders and to foreign governments, many of which do not respect the rule of law, many of which have abysmal human rights records and non-existent environmental laws. Through this Crown corporation, Canadian taxpayers became accomplices to environmental tragedies like the Omai spill; we unwittingly helped perpetuate repressive regimes such as those of Ceauçescu in Romania, Mobutu in Zaire and the junta in Argentina; we added to our national debt; and we perverted Canadian foreign policy.

EDC has financed an impressive string of fiascoes that has left havoc in its wake for the people affected by its projects while lining the pockets of the Canadian corporations that receive its largesse. West of Guyana in Colombia, EDC backed the Guavio hydroelectric complex, which has become synonymous in that country with white elephant. As Colombia’s leading news magazine, Semana, pointed out, the cost overruns alone from the ill-conceived project equalled half the nation’s entire budget for social programs. Colombians suffered as a result, but not Canadian General Electric, which carried out the work.

In China, EDC is bankrolling the sale of a Canadian supercomputer to help the authorities coordinate the forced resettlement of 1.3 million people from the Yangtze valley, many of whom are rumored to be destined for Tibet as part of the Chinese government’s colonization program. The resettlement will make way for the Three Gorges dam, the largest civil works project in the world. White elephant is too diminutive a term for the dam, a two-kilometre-wide wall across the Yangtze river. Hidden costs have tripled its official cost estimate to US$34 billion, and one Chinese banker told the Wall Street Journal that he expects a final cost of US$77 billion. Because the dam is being built over fault lines, seismologists fear its weight will induce an earthquake. Even without an earthquake, the dam will destroy the Yangtze’s ecosystem, imperil endangered species and submerge archeological sites dating back to 10,000 BC.

To please its political masters and corporate beneficiaries, EDC has stepped into this breech despite overwhelming evidence that it’s a boondoggle. The World Bank has warned that the project will not be economically viable. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, the world’s foremost dam building agency, withdrew from the project after supporting it for 50 years, on the grounds that the dam is neither environmentally nor economically feasible. Chinese and foreign experts believe the Yangtze’s sediment-laden waters could destroy the dam’s power turbines, cause flooding and disrupt navigation. Even the Chinese minister of energy believes that China does not need its power — conservation and efficiency improvements to the country’s backward energy complex would satisfy an economy twice China’s size. The only beneficiaries of this disaster-in-the-making are the Chinese leaders and bureaucrats who use megaprojects like these to distribute largesse to cronies; their Canadian counterparts who distribute largesse for political ends; and recipient companies like Ontario-based Monenco-AGRA, winner of one contract, and Quebec-based Canadian General Electric, who hopes to win a contract to build the dam.

EDC’s recklessness spans a generation. In 1974, EDC financed the Argentine government purchase of a Candu nuclear reactor that continually breaks down, threatening the environment, creating chaos for the economy and resulting in millions of dollars in losses to Canadian taxpayers. In this case, the Canadian recipient of EDC patronage was Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL), a Crown corporation that markets the country’s sorriest invention, the Candu nuclear reactor. Because the Candu could not sell on its own merits, the government enlisted the EDC, to the eventual shame of many taxpayers.

Ten days after EDC financing was put in place, AECL put $2.4 million into a Swiss bank account for an “agent” to clinch the sale, leading to bribery investigations by Canada’s Auditor General, a parliamentary inquiry and a public furor. In response to such questionable activities, the Canadian government decided to make a virtue of this vice. Revenue Canada pronounced that Canadians could legally bribe foreign officials and even made bribes tax deductible, provided the briber received a receipt. The trade minister of the day, Jean Chrétien, urged Canadians not to put their “head in the sand” and pass up overseas sales by being rigidly moralistic: “Commercial practices in other countries sometimes are different from ours. I am not about to condemn the morals of anybody. It would be very presumptuous for Canadians to tell other people how to conduct their morals.”

Many Canadian taxpayers think that economic progress requires holding our noses at times and taking on, through bodies like the EDC, these social, environmental and financial risks. Certainly our government would have us believe that export credit makes good economic sense for the recipient country and for us. Yet the evidence indicates otherwise.

The tenacious hold of a primitive economic theory

Virtually all governments use export credit to win foreign contracts for favored firms or to guarantee these firms’ foreign investments abroad, on the presumption that these deals would not otherwise occur.

The theory behind export credit is called mercantilism, the dominant economic theory of Adam Smith’s day, and one which he assailed. The theory went that a country would get rich by subsidizing exports, restricting imports, and hence amassing foreign exchange. Mercantilism operated through a web of decrees, tariffs, regulations and royal patronage plums to shipyards and porcelain factories, tapestry works and arsenals. Under the mercantilists, industrial growth depended upon a politically administered national economic policy, with the spoils going to well-connected industrial interests.

Though utterly discredited in theory, mercantilism has never been stamped out. Today, government-financed export credit agencies like the EDC promote mercantilism. Britain’s is called the Export Credits Guarantee Department; the United States has its Export-Import Bank; France, the Coface; and Japan, the Export-Import Bank of Japan. These agencies subsidize exports by using public funds to finance, insure and otherwise guarantee payment to their country’s exporters, even when the purchaser is all but bankrupt, as happened throughout the 1980s Third World debt crisis.

Rather than scrutinizing their projects’ viability, as real lenders are wont to do, the export credit agencies instead concentrate on marketing their export promotion funds, assembling a dazzling array of loan packages, credit lines, insurance programs and loan guarantee schemes to make sure Third World purchasers have the necessary money to buy their countries’ goods and services.

For the markets that the export agencies consider “spoiled” — those already accustomed to receiving low-cost financing — the export credit agencies and their government masters usually draw on more heavily subsidized funds to create what is known as “credit mixte” — a package of greatly discounted financing added to conventional export financing. The purpose, says EDC, is “to match . . . subsidized financing offered by competitors.” In Canada, this greatly discounted financing is disbursed from a $13-billion fund known as the Canada Account, when export contracts deemed to be in the “national interest” involve too much risk even for the EDC. From the government’s point of view, EDC is the perfect patronage vehicle to deliver money to favored corporations. Out of sight and beyond public scrutiny, EDC is exempt from the Access to Information Act, exempt from environmental laws governing government-financed projects, and it pleads commercial confidentiality to questions about its most basic activities.

Governments use export agencies to create jobs to win elections in key constituencies. In Britain, the law permits the Export Credits Guarantee Department to provide financial support for vote getting and other political purposes in exporting to what one British trade official called “dodgy markets.” Even those in charge of export credit agencies don’t claim they create wealth. Robert Richardson, EDC’s former president and chief executive officer, admitted that concessionary financing is not economical. “If other countries didn’t do it, we wouldn’t either,” he told the Financial Post. “Our approach is merely to match others.”

Officials at the U.S. Export-Import Bank made the same point in 1990, when, to conduct trade warfare, the Bush administration authorized a US$500-million program to combine subsidized export credits with foreign aid. “We think it’s a lousy and costly way to do business,” said Eugene Lawson, vice-chairman of Ex-Im, who announced the initiative in order to “attract the attention of our allies.” The initiative served notice to America’s competitors — principally Japan and France — that the U.S. would subsidize its exports until everyone gave up the costly practice.

EDC’s claims that it makes Canadian exporters competitive is also economic make-believe. These Canadian exporters haven’t won contracts because they’ve produced a better product for less money than their competitors: Rather, the Canadian government has subsidized them more than other governments have subsidized competitors. The effect of this on a nation’s economy is unhealthy, as documented by a French study that tidily expressed what everyone in the business knows, but few admit: “Export-credit subsidization wastes France’s scarce public resources in promotion of the wrong industries exporting the wrong products to the wrong markets.”

FROM A COMPANY POINT OF VIEW, EXPORT CREDIT AGENCIES OFFER a carefree and cheap way to avoid the risks of business. Omai’s majority owner, Montreal-based Cambior Inc., would not have invested in the gold mine without a US$163-million political risk insurance package from EDC. “We have shareholders, we want to be safe,” Cambior manager of investor relations Robert LaVallière told me. Unlike EDC, he found out, private insurers fear to tread in this area. EDC also steps in to ensure profits in projects too risky for the world’s banks and investment dealers. During a recent debate over EDC’s financing of a Candu sale to China, a Canadian bank executive explained that no commercial bank would lend against a nuclear power plant.

Export credit particularly benefits politically powerful firms. In the U.S., the Export-Import Bank, which financed two-thirds of Boeing Aircraft’s commercial jet sales abroad, became known as “Boeing’s Bank.” Britain’s corporate interests were so distraught at the prospect of losing their export financing that they stared down Margaret Thatcher when she tried to get rid of the Export Credits Guarantee Department in 1990. After a deluge of submissions by bankers and industrialists defending the ECGD’s services to exporters, the House of Commons Trade and Industry Committee defied her attempts to curb corporate welfare.

Export credit agencies do more than assume risks for companies; they simultaneously allow them to overcharge their customers. A 1969 World Bank report headed by former Canadian prime minister Lester Pearson discovered that Third World importers were paying inflated prices for goods and services financed with Western export credits, because these credits often financed projects where the only “feasibility study available is one prepared by the equipment supplier.” Because publicly subsidized export credits protect corporations from the competition, these corporations become uncompetitive, producing substandard goods at inflated prices. As an industrial subsidy, export credits are utter failures, creating coddled enterprises that depend for their survival on continuing state subsidies.

That these exports provide little value for money often matters little to the purchasing governments. Countries pushing reckless development schemes, like spendthrifts running up their credit card balances, don’t concern themselves with high financing rates. Because export credit agencies enforced less “rigorous tests of economic desirability,” the Pearson study found that export credit “provides a temporarily painless way of financing projects conceived by over-optimistic civil servants, by politicians more concerned with immediate political advantage than with potential future economic problems, and by unscrupulous salesmen for the manufacturers of capital equipment in developed countries.”

By allowing our corporations to ignore the financial risks of dealing with dictators, export credit helps sponsor bad governments and crony capitalism. When EDC stepped in to insure Cambior against the risk that it might have its assets expropriated, that it might not be able to transfer its funds out of Guyana and that it might not be able to enjoy its assets due to war and insurrection in Guyana, it interrupted an important message that the private sector would have otherwise sent to governments that don’t respect the rule of law or the rights of their citizens: “Clean up your act, prove to us that your government is legitimate and has the confidence of the people, show us the courts work fairly, govern your nation democratically, and then we’ll invest.” Or as Cambior’s LaVallière put it: “If you have $10 in your pocket and you can invest in Canada or Colombia, then where do you invest? Canada!”

In protecting the corporate sector from the need to make prudent investments, export credit agencies have cost their own taxpayers plenty. In 1990, the U.S. Export-Import Bank went into technical insolvency when it was forced to establish a US$4.8-billion reserve to cover the one-third of its loan portfolio deemed delinquent. Britain’s ECGD was forced to set aside reserves against its delinquent debts. So, too, did Canada’s EDC, after Canada’s Auditor General accused it of misleading taxpayers with financial statements that didn’t conform to generally accepted accounting principles.

The export credit agencies have their own way of pretending that their bad loans aren’t bad: They wish away the problem by rescheduling delinquent debts and then keep mum. Under rescheduling, if a debtor falls behind on interest, the creditor converts the interest to principal. If a debtor falls behind on principal, the government may adjust repayment dates or provide a repayment holiday. Little wonder Canada’s former auditor general, Kenneth Dye, called rescheduling “a shield to hide from public scrutiny losses the government has suffered or is likely to suffer on its sovereign loans. Paperwork disguises reality.” Or that Eugene Rotberg, a former World Bank treasurer, sees a “financial charade” in loan rescheduling: “If someone owes you money and you say ‘You don’t have to pay it for ten years,’ then ten years go by, and you don’t collect, and another ten years — well you may not wish to call that forgiveness for bookkeeping or political purposes, but you’re not getting paid. . . . Now I’m not going to talk about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, but that is de facto forgiveness.”

EDC argues that it does not cost taxpayers money, claiming it operates on a self-sustaining basis because it does not come back to parliament every year for bail-outs. But by borrowing its funds on the good faith and credit of Canadian taxpayers, EDC weakens Canada’s credit rating and increases the government’s borrowing costs. Were taxpayers to withdraw their guarantees of EDC’s borrowings on international financial markets and wash their hands of the risks that EDC assumes, EDC would cease to function.

EDC’s patronage harms Canada’s economy, and it harms us as taxpayers. But more importantly, it demeans us as citizens. By involving itself as a financial player in faraway business dealings, the Canadian government becomes a crass vested interest and a hypocrite when it claims otherwise.

Documents obtained using the Access to Information Act show the Canadian government’s unseemly behavior in the aftermath of the Omai mine disaster. While Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs was telling the press and public that the spill was primarily a private sector concern, feigning a hands-off approach, our High Commissioner in Georgetown was at the centre of negotiations between the company and the government. His single-minded goal was to get the Guyanese government to reopen the mine, without asking too many questions about the mine’s use of cyanide, not only to protect Omai — the continent’s second largest gold mine — but other Canadian mining operations. The documents show Canadian government fears that the “Guyanese people are growing increasingly suspicious that [the] mine’s technology might not be [the] best one for Guyana’s conditions” and that the Guyanese government’s enquiries into the “method of gold mining in Guyana will . . . impact directly on Canadian gold mining operations probably throughout South America.”

The impact would also hit the federal government’s books. Had the Guyanese government listened to its people and sent Cambior packing, a Cambior insurance claim against EDC would have followed. Fears over cyanide could spill into other countries. Because of the financial consequences for its own Crown corporation, who would then face potentially colossal claims throughout the world, the Canadian government became a behind-the-scenes lobbyist, making Canadian corporate interests Canadian government interests. In such ways, EDC’s financial interest in foreign operations like Omai compromises Canada’s foreign policy. Canadian citizens want our government to promote human rights and other democratic reforms in countries like China. Instead of representing the aspirations of Canadian citizens abroad, our government, compromised by business dealings it’s too ashamed of to disclose, panders to business interests.

Export agencies are anachronisms that do no good and much harm, at home and abroad, economically and environmentally. Their defenders are an unholy alliance of exporting corporations and patronage dispensing politicians. Their victims, to greater and lesser degrees, can be found wherever they have their operations, and right across Canada, because we all subsidize its operations with our tax dollars. The sooner that the public forces these business and government interests to get out of bed with each other, and the export agencies are shut down, the better for us all.